


On Tops of Mountains

by Maidenjedi



Category: Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-21
Updated: 2011-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 15:56:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/297553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maidenjedi/pseuds/Maidenjedi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stolen moments for Jo and Laurie, over the years.  AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Tops of Mountains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Silvestria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silvestria/gifts).



> Title from a quote by Henry David Thoreau: "On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning."

\- in the woods, awakening -

It was a cold winter, though perhaps not as cold as that first one had been. The pond did not ice enough for skating, the snow did not fall in drifts. They could go walking, if fancy struck, and it often did.

Meg would come along, or Mr. Brooke, sometimes little Amy who would affect to play a greatly burdened chaperone. But Jo and Laurie, always together, were a constant. Neighbors laughed at Mrs. March's planning and plotting - surely young Laurie would be for pretty Meg?

Not that the young people were remotely aware of the gossip, even after Meg's trip to the Moffats' revealed some of it. Laurie was not chivalrous except in jest, Jo not ladylike except in play, and they were oblivious to all the world and its cares and moralizing. They looked sixteen and seventeen; between them, they were every age and none.

Because of that, the family did not always remember they were boy and girl and that Laurie's voice was quite deep and Jo in need of a corset. They were without chaperone more often than with, and it was play and mischief that led them down deep woody paths, nothing more.

Laurie stole Jo's hat one day, or maybe took her hairpins, in retaliation for her snubbing his attempts to wheedle her latest story plans from her, or perhaps for feigning indignation at another story about Mr. Brooke's unrequited love for Meg. He took off running and Jo followed, overtaking him and laughing all the while. He tripped over a tree root or a rock on the path or his own feet, and she came back after a moment, breathless and giddy. It was another day, just the usual sort of thing, and then, without warning, she was sixteen and he was seventeen. Her dress was a shade too small, and he had neglected to shave that morning, and they were not children.

Jo's cheeks were bright with exercise and the brisk air, and she could not quite catch her breath. She was laughing as she fell to her knees beside her wounded Teddy, who was also laughing.

"Are you injured, good sir?"

"Just a scratch, milady, just a scratch."

He held out a hand and she took it, and he scrambled to a sitting position. He was a bit scraped, but more dirty and wet with snow than anything, and Jo fell to giggling harder as she brushed her hands against his chest to get the worst of it off.

Laurie was sober then, and sat totally stock still, watching Jo and thinking thoughts he had not given real time to before. He took her hands and Jo laughed again. "Do you mean to keep me here, then, in the woods with you? You are quite the woodsman now, all ruffled as you are."

He nodded and Jo grinned and tried to pull her hands away. Laurie would not let go and he returned her smile. "You have to pay me for the privilege of running away, you know. That's the way the fairy tales work."

Jo's hair flew as she shook her head. "No fairy tale I know."

"One you might write, however."

Jo considered her captor. "If I wrote this scene, the heroine would be forced to kiss the villian in order to escape."

Laurie shrugged. "If you wrote this scene, the heroine would kiss the villian only to discover he was, in the end, her hero."

"Not likely, if I were true to the tale playing out here."

Laurie feigned hurt. "You wouldn't know your hero if he was right in front of you, milady?"

She shook her head again, another pin flying loose. "I have no hero, for I am in need of none."

Laurie had to kiss her then. Her muffled surprise faded, and her hands went slack in his.

He broke the kiss first, and Jo's eyes remained closed. "Um...Teddy....we...."

Her face was soft, and he was surprised at himself, at her. It hadn't come of anything, he thought firmly, determined not to fall into romanticizing something Jo would likely rather forget. Teddy, we must not, was surely what came next.

Letting her go, Laurie stood and took off at a run. "Bet you an apple I beat you to the road!"

 

\- when the war's over -

There was a picnic at Plumfield, one of Aunt March's rare displays of generosity to the neighborhood. The war was over and it seemed as good a time as any to celebrate, and even Aunt March was not so cold and unfeeling that she couldn't rejoice in the return of Concord's young men.

Laurie had escaped the war - most accepted that he'd been in school, too young, all the usual stories, and perhaps Mr. Laurence really had not paid the government's required duty to keep his only grandson out of harm's way. Perhaps. The Marches, at any rate, never asked, if they did wonder. So Laurie was without scar, without limp, without haunted eyes, much good though it would do him with the hero-worshippers among the daughters of the local gentry.

Not that he cared, while Jo March danced beneath the plum trees.

She picked ripe plums and dropped as many as she saved; Beth stood nearby with a basket, laughing at her sister, unreserved in that great shadow. Laurie approached with a handful of plums and put them in the basket, then placed a finger on his lips, signaling to Beth that she wasn't to give him away.

She smiled wide and blushed, stepping back a little to allow him room for whatever prank he was going to play.

Jo's hair had finally grown past her shoulders; he wasn't to know that, of course, and it was tightly arranged at the nape of her neck in a womanly fashion that betrayed Jo. Laurie had noticed it wasn't the only betrayal; Jo filled out her dress better than she had the summer before, or the summer before that. He could see where it faded, around her hips, a little higher. He wasn't supposed to notice.

And before he could think too much on it, he grabbed Jo at the waist from behind, swaying into her impromptu dance, and joined his voice with her warbling one to sing the lyrics of a happy, celebratory song.

Jo jumped, but didn't move away, and she sang louder, as if to drown him out and pretend he was not there.

But she danced, she swayed, she kept up a rhythm and her right hand dropped down to grasp Laurie's.

Beth was gone by then, anxious not to interrupt whatever it was that was happening. Laurie heard her go, he did not call out. He took a breath and a chance, spun Jo around.

And placed a kiss on her lips, soft and quick, so that she might not have a chance to bite or snap.

"Teddy, my boy," she whispered. Whether because she was caught up in the moment, or because, as no one save Beth suspected, she had never stopped fearing he might march south and come back broken or not all, she kissed him back.

 

\- while packing -

"You'll need your Plato again. I don't know why you always leave it behind."

They went through this packing ritual every fall, as Laurie prepared to leave for school. And every time, Laurie did what he could to leave some essential item behind, so that he might have cause to retrieve it at some point, have a reason to come back to his grandfather's and of course, to visit Orchard House.

Jo need not know that, though. Better she think him dimwitted, assume that he was just in a hurry and forgot things, then think he did it so he could see her face.

This was nearly the last time he would leave this place (and her), and yet he watched Jo's face as she struggled once again to hide her envy at his "good fortune," as she called it. What she wouldn't give to be in Laurie's shoes - she hadn't said it aloud, more than once or twice and then very early on. But when he was home, and she wanted more to hear what it was like to study Shakespeare with learned men, to discuss Socrates in late afternoon sessions, than to hear about her Teddy's latest romantic conquests, then he knew what agitated her the most.

He took the Plato from her. "At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet," he whispered. Jo had used that one against him before, whenever he tried wooing her. He didn't try often, knowing as he did that she would scoff or place that dratted pillow between them. She sometimes hit him with it.

She heard him, though, and she sighed. A small smile appeared, a sad smile. "Don't, Teddy." And another sigh, deeper, as she reached up on the shelf for his Cowper. She was not tall enough, and her slender body stretched, she stood on tip-toe.

She stumbled, and he caught her by the elbow.

"Careful, Jo, it isn't worth breaking something to get down a book of poetry I've read a thousand times before."

She didn't shake him off, as she usually did. Instead she stood there, staring down at his fingers.

"Do you think there is anything out there for me?"

It was unexpected, this introspective mood of hers.

"Why, Jo, don't you?"

She tilted her head back and laughed. "If only!"

Laurie could not stand so close to her, with her neck so exposed, her mood so sentimental, and not want to kiss her. She had to know that. She had to know, he was a poet, with her.

"Jo." His voice was thick.

She looked back at him. She put her hand over his, still on her arm.

"Teddy, I...." And he stopped her then, and she let him. She put one hand to his face.

He forgot to take his Plato, after all.

 

\- the last time, before all time -

Mrs. Theodore Laurence. It was on her new stationery, on her trunk. Sewn inside the one dress Beth had been able to help her make, before the needle became "so heavy."

But she was not Mrs. Theodore Laurence, not yet, as he had agreed to wait.

Beth was going to get well, Jo had decreed it and therefore it would be so, and all the rest of them might do is wait and pray and hope. For Jo would move mountains if the situation required, Laurie once said, in a jolly time when Meg and Amy might chastise his blasphemy and Beth feign shock.

Meg, married, living away and living the life of a young mother. Amy, in Europe, far from the cares of home. Beth, lying...well. They didn't like to say it aloud, and Laurie hated to think it.

He had proposed to Jo, just as Beth had returned, plump and rosy, from a trip to the seaside. Jo, overwhelmed and too happy with Beth's seeming improvement, had not hesitated, had said yes without thinking, because why should she stop to consider? She had known he would ask, she had guessed she might say yes. They were no less quarrelsome, no less apt to drive each other to distraction. These qualities just lay dormant as the family - that meant the Laurences, too, of course - watched as Beth's rosy cheeks paled and her plump figure waned once more.

Her breath caught on simple words, but she was peaceful, and Jo was comforted. That last morning, Beth spoke of what was to come, for the others. She smiled at Jo, the brightest and strongest smile Jo had seen on her sister's face in a long time.

"You will be happy, Jo. Don't hold back."

And Jo was not surprised, though she'd said nothing about her quiet fears, her occasional desire to throw Teddy off and run away. She shook her head at Beth, told her those things did not matter, and Beth answered the press of Jo's hand with a small twinge of her own.

The months after passed in dull routine, no one willing to break the silence for fear it would mean they really had lost Beth. When her laugh would not join theirs, the laughter stopped cold, and so it was that the Marches and the Brookes and the Laurences lived in a mirthless world.

Amy wrote, her engagement to Fred Vaughn finally official, and the wedding set for late summer, once a proper mourning period was over. She would return a grand, married lady on her honeymoon. And the stagnation in Concord began to crumble.

The twins amused them all, and Daisy's disposition being so like Beth's as a little girl, those who remembered were softened. One by one, they began wearing dove grey, then lighter colors, so that by the fall only Jo remained in solid black, a veil over her face when she went out.

She was prone to tears, and could not stand even Laurie's sympathy. She ran often to the woods, to a place undisclosed. Finally, as October came to a close, he followed her. Laurie always followed Jo, it seemed, if she wasn't already following him.

"Jo," he whispered, finding her at an old, rotting post. He thought she would be weeping. She was not, but she had been.

"I don't think I can, after all," she said, and fought back a sob.

Laurie sighed, shoving his hands in his pockets. "Alright," he said.

They were quiet for some time, the noise from animals and the slight fall breeze the only thing to be heard. Jo reached for Laurie's hand, and he placed it in hers.

"She wanted me to, you know."

He said nothing.

"She wanted us to be happy. I think she was trying to reconcile herself to...leaving. I think she wanted you to take care of me." Jo scoffed at that. "I can't bear to think of being happy without her here, you understand. And we would not be happy, not really."

"That's where you're wrong."

"No."

"Yes, Jo." He pulled her to him, unresisting, and kissed her. She laid her head on his shoulder, and the sobs came.

"How can we be happy, with her gone?"

"It isn't about her. Is it?"

Jo shrugged, moved closer to him, if that was possible.

"What, then?"

She pushed away and looked up at him. "It isn't all about her. I'm not convinced, Teddy. I'm not certain. One day I think it is all I want - you, a home, a marriage. The next I want to run away, I want to explore and I want to fly. She tried to tell me...but I don't think she could have been right."

Jo's voice was full of doubt, and Laurie was not certain he should say anything. She looked at him, though, and her hair was out of place, falling in her eyes. She had inkstains, even now, on her hands, and her dress was mussed from running. If he did not look right at her - if his gaze was just off-center - he could see her as she stood when they met. As he'd known her, for years, as a girl.

The time she introduced him to the Pickwick Society. The letters in the post office he'd placed between their homes, the ink smeared from the hurry she'd been in. Long walks that turned into races. Secrets shared. The time Beth had been sick, and Jo had sought his comfort. That first kiss, in the woods and in the snow, and each shy time after, and how hard Jo would fight to keep him away if he alluded to those kisses.

The way she'd looked when he finally proposed, and the breathless yes that changed his life.

He could not imagine a world without Jo March. He would not face such a world.

Laurie placed his hands on either side of her face. "We will have adventure, my darling. We will have flight, and risk, and you can be whatever you want to be. I only ask that we do it together. Do you see?"

Jo closed her eyes. "I want to."

"Then marry me, Jo."

And he kissed her once again.

 

\- epilogue -

They never did fly - but oh, they came so close.


End file.
